Belgium To Take Facebook On Over Local Privacy Law Concerns

The Belgian privacy commission is taking the US-owned Facebook to court as the latter allegedly doesn’t respect European privacy laws, The Guardian reported on Monday.

The lawsuit will be heard on Thursday in Brussels, after a report by the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT at the University of Leuven in Belgium. The report claimed the social network’s privacy policy violates European Union laws.

The whole mess started with the fact that Facebook tracked people who were logged out of the network, as well as those who weren’t members of the social media site in the first place, all with the goal of placing advertisement.

Facebook said the tracking of people that aren’t its members was a bug and that it fixed it.

“It’s not because we want start a lawsuit over this, but we cannot continue to negotiate through other means,” Debeuckelaere told Belgian news DeMorgen which broke the news.

“We want a judge to impose our recommendations. These recommendations are chiefly aimed at protecting internet users who are not Facebook members,” he said.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We were surprised and disappointed that, after the [Belgium privacy commission] had already agreed to meet with us on the 19 June to discuss their recommendations, they took the theatrical action of bringing Facebook Belgium to court on the day beforehand.

Currently, Facebook is facing a plethora of charges and changes to how it deals with Europeans information. Several other US corporations including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are also being investigated by different courts in Europe.